Department of English and American Studies Possessive Pronouns in English and Czech Works of Fiction, Their Use with Parts of Hu
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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Kristýna Onderková Possessive Pronouns in English and Czech Works of Fiction, Their Use with Parts of Human Body and Translation Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek 2009 0 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………… 1 I would like to express thanks to my supervisor, Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek, for his valuable advice. 2 Table of Contents 1 Introduction.................................................................................................................... 5 2 Theory.............................................................................................................................. 7 2.1 English possessive pronouns.......................................................................... 7 2.1.1 Grammatical properties................................................................... 7 2.1.2 Use...................................................................................................... 8 2.2 Czech possessive pronouns............................................................................. 9 2.2.1 Grammatical properties................................................................... 10 2.2.2 Use...................................................................................................... 11 2.3 Translating possessive pronouns.................................................................... 11 3 Frequency data analysis.................................................................................................14 3.1 Frequency of possessive pronouns in original English and Czech works of fiction................................................................................................ 15 3.2 Frequency of possessive pronouns in original English and Czech works of fiction and their translations.......................................................... 23 3.3 Frequency of possessive pronouns used with parts of human body in original Czech and English works of fiction............................................. 31 3.4 Frequency of possessive pronouns used with parts of human body in original Czech and English works of fiction and their translations....... 37 4 Translating possessive pronouns – practical analysis................................................. 44 4.1 Translating possessive pronouns used with parts of human body from English into Czech.................................................................................. 44 4.1.1 Introduction...................................................................................... 44 4.1.2 Analysis............................................................................................. 48 3 4.2 Translating possessive pronouns used with parts of human body from Czech into English.................................................................................................... 74 4.2.1 Introduction....................................................................................... 74 4.2.2 Parts of human body used with a possessive pronoun in Czech... 75 4.2.3 Parts of human body used with the verb “mít“ (= to have) in Czech............................................................................................. 76 4.2.4 Parts of human body used with a personal pronoun in the dative case in Czech............................................................... 77 4.2.5 Parts of human body used with a personal pronoun in the accusative case in Czech........................................................ 80 4.2.6 Parts of human body used with a zero pronoun in Czech............ 82 4.2.7 Conclusion......................................................................................... 89 5 Conclusion....................................................................................................................... 94 6 Bibliography.................................................................................................................... 98 4 1. Introduction The present diploma thesis deals with possessive pronouns, particulary those used with parts of human body, in literary translations from English into Czech and vice versa. It focuses on the differences in the use of possessive pronouns in English and Czech, and various possibilities of their translation from one language into another. Possessive pronouns constitute a rather small grammatical category to which not much attention has been paid so far in the Czech academic environment and even less has been written about their translation from and into English. However, as possessive pronouns are treated differently in the two languages, their translation may be problematic especially for inexperienced translators and may often result in unnatural, source-language influenced phrases. The principal aim of this thesis is to help translators to avoid similar errors by creating some general rules on the translation of possessive pronouns to which translators can turn whenever they are not certain how to translate a particular phrase. It also tries to help to clarify how possessive pronouns are treated in the individual languages, which may also be useful for linguists or language learners. The thesis is conceived as a corpus study. All the data used for analysis were retrieved from the parallel corpus Kačenka, created at the Department of English and American Studies, the Faculty of Arts at the Masaryk University in Brno, and the parallel corpus InterCorp, recently created by the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, as a part of the original Czech National Corpus. Corpus linguistics has proven still more useful in translation studies in the recent years, enabling easy access to a large number of existing translations of the selected unit in various published literary and non-literary works. For my analysis of translation of possessive pronouns from English into Czech, which is the main part of my thesis, I used the whole corpus Kačenka, randomly selecting several pages for each data. For other parts of my thesis, I used three English novels and their Czech translations in the corpus 5 Kačenka: Kingsley Amis´s Lucky Jim, Thomas Hardy´s Jude the Obscure, and Mark Frost´s The List of 7, and three Czech novels and their English translations in the corpus InterCorp: Zdeněk Jirotka´s Saturnin, Milan Kundera´s Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, and Michal Viewegh´s Výchova dívek v Čechách. The first part of my thesis is rather theoretical as it presents the information collected from the secondary literature, constituted predominantly by Czech and English books of grammar and some other linguistic works. It introduces some basic information on the form, grammatical properties, use, and the translation of possessive pronouns. It also presents some general hypotheses on the differences in the use of possessive pronouns, particulary those used with parts of human body, which I will try to verify in the analytical part of my thesis. The second part of my thesis examines the frequency of possessive pronouns and the frequency of possessive pronouns used with parts of human body in original Czech and English works of fiction and their translations in order to gain and verify some general hypotheses on the differences in use of possessive pronouns in the two languages. The third part of my thesis is constituted by the analysis of the translation of possessive pronouns used with parts of human body from English into Czech and vice versa. It presents a number of examples of how possessive pronouns and phrases containing possessive pronouns are translated and tries to clarify the reasons for the particular translations. It states some general rules on translating possessive pronouns from English into Czech and vice versa, along with rules regarding the use of possessive pronouns in each language. 6 2 Theory 2.1 English possessive pronouns Possessive pronouns in English are not a clearly defined category and various grammar books treat them differently. The problem arises from the fact that there exist two sets of English possessive pronouns: the first being pronouns with a determinative function and therefore dependent on the noun, the second being pronouns used independently as a noun phrase (Quirk 361). Table 1: Determinative and independent possessive pronouns in English determinative my your his her its our their (thy) independent mine yours his hers its ours theirs (thine) While there are no differences about the category of independent pronouns which are generally listed as possessive pronouns, determinative pronouns are sometimes referred to as possessive pronouns (Quirk 361), sometimes as possessive determiners (Biber, 270) or even possessive adjectives (Curme 46) or genitive articles (Strang 128). As the idea to see the first set as pronouns is closer to the Czech grammar, where no difference in form exists, and since the second set of pronouns is not dealt with in my thesis, I decided to leave the first set in the pronoun category and speak of them as possessive pronouns. 2.1.1 Grammatical properties Determinative possessive pronouns function as determiners – i.e. they are used to specify the reference of a noun (Biber 258) and they are in complementary distribution with 7 articles, demonstrative determiners and other determiners (Dušková 106). However, they can be regarded as pronouns as they share their ability to replace